


The Price

by gregorin_greymalkin



Series: Vengeance of Villains [1]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Dark Avengers - Freeform, Gang Rape, Hurt/Comfort, Rape, Uncanny X-Men - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 08:20:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4953139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gregorin_greymalkin/pseuds/gregorin_greymalkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vengeance of Villain Series: X-Men villains revenge themselves on Cyclops.</p><p>After the X-Men gain Utopia Norman Osborn seeks brutal revenge against Cyclops. Daken and Dark Beast help. Can Wolverine and the real Beast save Cyclops from being broken completely?</p><p>Takes place after Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Exodus 001</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Price

Henry McCoy was aware that some of this rage was misdirected; that it was not, in fact, Scott Summers’ fault that he had languished for all these days, unlooked for and abandoned, being tortured by his other self. Nevertheless, it was Scott he was blaming. All the times he had rescued Scott and when he had needed the favor returned, Scott had been nowhere. And he knew, full well, that Scott was now so arrogantly self-assured that he was taking criticism from no one. He would not listen to Henry’s complaints; he would not alter his behavior a jot as a consequence of anything that Henry said. All one could do with him at this point was to cease enabling him with passive support. He was going to tell him what he thought of him and then he was going to leave without a backward glance. The only question was whether or not Scott would even give a damn.

~

Daken is a walking binary opposition. He is never with anyone, not really. He is always alone. He is never anyone's subordinate, even when they tie him up and torture him to make him do as he's told and he fakes obedience for a while. It's always a lie. He is currently part of a team. He is currently working for Norman Osborn. He is currently enjoying himself. Everyone else on the team is a dick. He likes to be on the winning side. He'd really like to see his fellow dicks get their asses handed to them. He'd like to see Osborn fail. The man's a seething cauldron of barely suppressed insanity, and Daken thinks all unwatched pots need to boil over from time to time. It would be fun to see the guy lose it. 

Daken hates to lose.

Defeat was a painfully pleasurable experience. The closest thing he has to a little sister just beat the crap out of him. His current biggest regret is that he forgot to cop a feel while she was doing it. He wonders what she'd taste like if he slipped his tongue between her legs. He wonders if she'd taste like Daddy, taste like Daken, taste like the laboratory in which they cooked her up like clawed crystal meth. He wants to suck on her nipples and make her love him, just for a moment. Later, he watches Hentai with his right hand and imagines her taking it from him right up the ass. He wishes there was a telepath passing by to pass that thought onto Wolverine. He imagines his grieving, outraged, horrified roars. He imagines his secret guilty comprehension.

Daken likes to share.

Osborn's still mostly crazy. He's clawed victory out of defeat, done his broadcast, claimed things went just the way he planned, but he's raging inside. Here, in this secret back room well away from nervous cameramen, he smells of anger as he prowls up and down. Cyclops bested him and everyone who counts knows it. Dark Beast steeples his hairy fingers and tries to look sane. Daken thinks that's cute. No one in this room is achieving sane right now.

Daken licks his lips and said, "So – nice hard-on while you were kicking the crap out of Cyclops, Norman. Very impressive."

Osborn doesn't say _Fuck you, Wolverine's bastard off-shoot, you psychotic little shit, I want to pull out your claws and shove them up your ass_ , but he smells like it and his eyes rage like it. 

Daken shrugs elegantly. "What does it matter that he knows he beat you? The world doesn't. What does it matter that he suckered you into pounding him all over that island while your plan went to crap all around you."

"If you'd done your part –!"

"Hey, I got beaten up by girls. You should take pity on my bruised masculine ego. I may never get it up again."

“You’d better hope you still can for what I’ve got planned.” Osborn’s eyes glow crazy in the strip-lighting. “Bring Summers here. Help me punish him.”

~

There’s just a fatal second when Summers thinks they’re the real deal – his senses are so weak compared with Daken’s, so he can’t go by scent, and they look the same – thinks it’s Wolverine and the real McCoy walking towards him. That’s how they manage to take him down. The chloroform helps. Dark Beast explains, as he throws Summers over his shoulder, that he didn’t want Daken to damage the merchandise before Osborn’s had a chance to make his point. The man is already a strain upon the nerves. They don’t need him any crazier than he already is.

After the inevitable beating, Osborn makes his point on the office floor, panting and grunting, it’s frenzied and brutal, and Summers, on his knees, hands cuffed behind his back, no access to his blasts, Osborn with full access to every part of him, takes it silently, although he damn near chews through his lip to do it.

The scents are delicious – all that lust and rage and pain and blood and come – and Osborn has a lot of rage stored up so even though he’s slamming into him like an animal, snarling about all Summers is fit for, he makes it last a lot longer than Daken expected. Afterwards, he pulls out, panting hard, but the crazy light is fading a little, some sanity winking back on as he looks down at his softening cock and where it’s just been staking its claim. His smile is ugly.

“Who’s the winner now, you uppity little shit?”

Dark Beast says, “Cyclops, as a matter of interest have you ever done it with this dimension’s McCoy?”

Summers carefully unclenches his teeth and says, “No.”

“This will be a novel experience for both of us then.”

Dark Beast’s less brutal but he’s big and Summers barely chokes down a cry. McCoy is scientific: trying experiments, assessing results; by the end he probably knows everything he needs about what Summers hates most. Daken’s not sure he even got off on it, he’s just collecting data while his hips pump and he makes careful note of every reactive squirm. He comes silently and withdraws with an oddly gentlemanly precision. 

Summers drags in a sobbing breath but he’s not begging or screaming, and Daken’s pretty sure he never would, whatever they did to him, he’d just go to a place in his head where no one could reach him and then not come back. That, he imagines, is Summers’ ultimate escape route, the one no one but a telepath can stop him reaching should the need arise.

Daken’s turn and he intends to be cruel, so he starts with a kiss, tender and mocking, across Scott’s broken mouth from where Osborn backhanded him around the office before he got started. He licks off the blood and Scott keeps his jaw clenched rigidly, not permitting a real kiss. Daken kisses up his face, runs his fingers through his hair, sucks on his neck, and he can feel the shaking, because he’s giving the shock a chance to do its thing. The shock is delicious. Kneeling behind him now, Daken licks it from Scott’s sweat-salted skin, running his tongue down the bump-bump-bump of his spine. He’s still beautifully bruised from the Utopia beating Osborn gave him and those places are hot against the tongue, a fine bleed beneath the surface. Daken bites below the base of the ribcage, on the right side, and Scott barely stifles a cry. Daken slips his finger into him, and it’s wet with other men’s come in there, deliciously hot and sore. 

“Do you think my father would fuck you like a dog, Cyclops?” he breathes in his ear. “Is that how you imagine it when you lie there at night and wonder? I think he’d fuck you like this.”

He shoves his cock in roughly for punctuation and demonstrates with a hard deep-dicking, making Summers take it to the hilt, one hand tight in his hair, another hard on his hip, keeping him in place for Daken’s pleasure. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had from him and Daken takes his time. If they had been alone, just the two of them in a nice cabin in the woods, with handcuffs and whips and a gag to stifle Summers’ screams, he would have gone the whole way: worked his balls into him and managed a proper tie. He’s almost sure that would have done the most interesting psychological damage, to literally make Cyclops his bitch. He’s worried even this might be something Cyclops can repress. He would hate his touch to be forgotten when he really wants to sear it into Summers’ brain.

His self-control’s good but even he can’t spin it out forever in the face of Summers’ choked down pain and strangled sobbing breaths and that miraculously still-tight ass. He comes with a groan that comes from so deep inside him he thinks his father might have left it there.

"Hey, Scott…" he whispers in his ear as he slides out of him. "You think me and Logan are so far apart that all we share is DNA. The truth is, we're the same. We're exactly the same. So, when you limp back home and let that Frost bitch lick you better, you think about that. You think about the man you're alone with on that little island mutant paradise. You think about what would really happen if he ever admitted to himself how much he wants you. You think about how you'd have to take it and about how it would feel when he was trickling out of you, his gushing come cooling in your pounded ass…."

Cyclops rolls over carefully, not wincing where it can be seen. Despite the hands cuffed behind his back, he gets to his feet with something oddly close to dignity, even though he stinks of three different kinds of come. "Keep telling yourself that, Daken, if it makes you feel better. Nothing will ever make it true. He's ten times the man you are or ever would have been, however you were raised. Must suck to be you in a world where your father is always going to be what you wish you were but never ever will be."

Rage flares, white light, a storm-sea of fury, and Daken finds himself being held off by Dark Beast. Cyclops doggedly climbing back to his feet, wiping off the fresh flow of blood on his shoulder with a dismissive twist of the head. That's just one of his many enraging characteristics, his inability to grasp when he needs to stay down. Daken knows how Osborn felt when he was punching his lights out.

Cyclops doesn't bother with Dark Beast but he glances dismissively at Osborn. "You still lost. Are we done?"

Dark Beast said, "Kill him now and it will always be unsatisfactory. There may be a later occasion when it would be truly delicious."

Osborn says, "Get rid of him."

It could mean a lot of things. Daken has his own interpretation. Dark Beast comes along to compare notes.

 

Daken is cruel to Cyclops in a dark alley with a winking neon light too far away to leave more than a distant red reflection and everything smelling of piss. He likes that Summers is cuffed to a rusty fire escape, clinging to his silence by a choked down cry. He keeps his head pulled back so even if he managed to get a hand to his visor, all he would do is send up a red flare begging the stars for help. Dark Beast gets hard watching what Daken does even though Daken is pretty sure that when he wasn’t being tortured, Cyclops wouldn’t do it for him. It’s the pain that does it; the way his bruised body is revealed in neon winking strips under the ripped clothes; all that lean flexing strength working to free itself from bonds that don’t give way, fighting to keep silent against pain that just keeps jolting through him, rough and fast; that beautiful body and its honed muscles now just something they own.

“Maybe I’ll keep you forever,” Daken whispers hotly, licking his earlobe as he increases his pace. “Maybe I’ll chain you up in a place where no one will ever find you and Daddy will always wonder what became of you. Maybe I’ll break you until you couldn’t be any more broken, and then I’ll make you grateful for even a spit of praise.”

Dark Beast says, “Daddy Xavier or Daddy Wolverine?”

“Both.”

There is a silence filled with steady grunts and the rapid slap of flesh on flesh. Daken lets the pleasure build slowly, getting extra enjoyment from the way Wolverine has never got to do this even though he must surely want to; that it’s the leader of the X-Men he’s fucking; that club too exclusive for him to join; well, now he’s busted down the gates and how. 

He thinks how much he would love to fill Scott Summers’ taut belly with his cubs; wonders if Dark Beast can find a way to make that happen. Thinks how satisfying it would be to truly keep Summers forever, their sex-toy, and pet, and brood-mare and science experiment. Break him down from the stubborn bastard he is now, break him completely, and then build him up as their sex-slave; mind-wiped of every other allegiance, programmed to respond only to them and the pain they give him, teach him to be grateful even for their blows. He imagines twelve months would do it, if they were only intensively and imaginatively extreme enough; it’s not like Summers is sane beneath his scar tissue; that damaged little boy is still in there somewhere, waiting to be prized free like a mussel from its shell. 

It’s when he imagines giving him back to Wolverine at the end of the experiment, white-lined with lash marks, stinking of come, a broken, obedient swallower of semen and mindless receiver of countless punishing dicks… Yes, God, yes, it’s at the thought of the look on Logan’s face when he realized what they’d done to his pure-hearted leader boy that the pleasure builds until it can’t be contained.

Daken comes again, a white fire orgasm that pulls up from the root, and he’s pumping Cyclops full of his come, loving the gush of it, salt and hot inside him, inescapable as he drags his head back by the hair and tells him he’s Daken’s bitch now; now and for always.

Dark Beast is aroused by the cruel chaos of it; the fear Cyclops is trying to suppress that he might not have strength enough to get away from them before their interest ebbs; that they might, after all, be able to fuck all the fight out of him. They are so much stronger than he is that the deficit is delicious. Even Daken has to admit it’s a turn on when Dark Beast’s great blue-furred body looms over a chained up Cyclops, dwarfing him, and that punishing cock is pushed in, hard and deep.

Cyclops chokes down a cry and it’s beautiful music because Daddy never got to fuck him like this or watch someone else fuck him. Daken has those images forever, the sobbing breaths and the stifled pain and the feel of Cyclops squirming away from the impaling and thrusting and stretching and bruising, tearing his wrists bloody as he tries to struggle free. 

“You’re ours forever, Cyclops,” Daken tells him, and Dark Beast, grunting as he thrusts, enthusiastically agrees.

~

Ironic really that Beast had come to tell Scott that they were done and why; that he’d had enough of Scott’s puppet mastery, manipulating everything, including fellow mutants, so that mutants can be safe.

“He needs to understand that the ends doesn’t always justify the means. That some of us have had it with his cavalier arrogance….”

Logan didn’t agree so he’d just made sympathetic noises as they looked for Cyke so Hank could flounce off dramatically and leave them to their new asteroid island sanctuary.

“Ya do know Osborn beat the crap out of him?” Logan offered. “It’s not like he walked away without a mark, and he didn’t know you and Chuck were prisoners, Hank….”

Beast wasn’t listening so Logan shrugged and let him spew his hurt and disappointment, and understood how a man could get to feel like that. Cyke was good at letting you know you were needed; not so good at letting you know that you mattered or that he cared.

“Where is he anyway?” 

Logan had asked everyone now who ought to know and they all thought he was somewhere else – their triumphant leader who had taken his public beating for the public good and won them their Utopia. He and Henry exchanged a glance because it was actually kinda weird that no one had seen Slim for four hours straight. 

Beast grimaced. “Damn him!”

“He ain’t hidin’ from you, Hank.”

“I know! That halfwit is in trouble.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I’ve known him since he was fifteen years old, Logan. I know when he’s in trouble. That’s how I know he should have known that I was if he’d only bothered to spare me a thought. We need to find the freshest scent and follow it….”

They found it in the bay; Cyke lured back to the mainland for something. Henry dipped and picked up a piece of white paper, fluttering like a dove feather. It was in his handwriting and demanded a meeting, at once, on the mainland, to discuss why he had been left to be experimented on while Scott was planning his strategy. It had been held by Scott and so presumably read by Scott; they could smell his scent on the paper.

“I didn’t write this,” Hank said bleakly.

“Your handwriting and Dark Beast’s are the same.” Logan was as uneasy as he could possibly get now. He sniffed the air and said, “Fuck – I smell chloroform.” They both began to run.

~

“You know something else I share with Daddy – a really short recovery time. Ready to go again, Cyclops?”

Daken has made a mental agreement with himself that if Cyclops says ‘Please…’ he’ll stop. The boy he once was would have said it; he would have shown sense enough to beg. They’re not monsters, after all, they’re reachable people, but Cyclops isn’t trying to reach them; he’s just trying to pretend they’re not there and this isn’t happening to him.

“You know, Scott, my boy, you really can’t repress reality forever,” Dark Beast says quite sympathetically. “You are going to have to engage with us at some point.”

Daken licks the blood from Cyclops’ mouth and combs his fingers through his sweat-matted hair. His voice is a soft, seductive purr. “I can make you want me. I can make you want this. Don’t pretend I’m the monster under the bed and that hiding under the covers will stop me from seeing you. I’m real and I’m here and you’re going to have to deal with me if you ever want to go home.”

Cyclops, bleeding but unbroken, his voice a painful rasp, says, “You’ll make a mistake. You always do.”

It’s interesting, Daken thinks, that Cyclops hasn’t tried to suggest that taking him and raping him multiple times is Daken’s mistake; that it will bring down the wrath of the other X-Men upon him; bring down Logan’s wrath and anguish and everlasting hate. Which is kind of frustrating when that’s the reaction he’s hoping for here. He tightens his grip in his hair.

“What? Don’t you think I’ve done enough to piss Daddy off yet? You don’t think me fucking your ass raw is gonna make him mad?”

Cyclops says painfully, “You’re his son. He’d forgive you if just asked him to.”

It’s Dark Beast who says curiously, “You forgave Stryfe, did you? The rumor is that he did some very unfilial things to you. It must be such a burden, Scott, being so pretty that even the clone of your own son can’t keep his hands off you….”

“Do you think Wolverine hasn’t noticed how pretty you are? Dream on, Cyclops.” Daken slips a finger up inside Cyclops’s abused little hole and it’s slick with come and heated with bruises in there. “Osborn really did ream you good and hard, didn’t he?” he muses, sliding his finger in and out rhythmically. “Did you like it? Having a real man show you who was boss? I bet you did, secretly. I bet you got off on him smacking you around on that island, and him making you take his cock up your tight little ass was just the finishing touch. I bet you’d love it even more if it was Wolverine fucking you, tho. I bet you’ve rubbed one out to the idea of him throwing you down and making you his bitch a hundred times….”

~

The scents were so impossible that Logan and Henry exchanged a disbelieving glance. Neither one of them had ever had sex with Scott Summers and yet the night air was thick and sour with the scent of their eager semen and his sweat and blood and pain. They followed the coiling perfume of themselves and Scott along squalid streets lined with dumpsters and metallic with fire escapes. They turned a dead dog decorated corner and saw their doppelgangers, Daken with his hand wrapped around Scott Summers’ cock, trying to force an orgasm from his beaten, head-hanging body, while Dark Beast raped him brutally from behind with rhythmic grunts of satisfaction. Scott was hanging from his cuffed wrists, jolting to their music, barely conscious, just enduring it.

They roared in like the wrath of God, and perhaps righteous indignation lent them extra strength or their dark mirrors were hampered by their previous exercise and most recent erections. For whatever reason, their blows beat the others down and drove them off, Logan’s claws slick with blood. On any other day they would have hunted them down for what they’d done to Scott, but he was in too urgent need of their help for them to have time to squander in pursuit. Logan sliced through the cuffs. Henry caught Scott as he slumped, barely aware he had been rescued. 

There was a moment when he flinched because it was still people with blue fur and savage claws pressing in on him but then his vision or mind must have cleared because he caught at Henry’s arm and said hoarsely: “Hank…?”

“Yes, Scott, it’s me.”

“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you for days.”

“Never mind that now. We need to get you to a hospital.”

That met with immovable resistance. That, Scott insisted, was what Osborn wanted; self-proclaimed mutant leader abducted and assaulted by mutant criminals; the press would get hold of it somehow. It would end up being about mutants being bad guys again.

“In this case, Scott,” said Hank tersely. “They undoubtedly are bad guys.”

“But they look like you and Logan. Please, just take me back to Utopia.”

“Not in this state, Cyke – you wouldn’t be good for morale. We need to make you a little more presentable.”

They took him to a place around the corner with a neon sign that said it had vacant rooms. It was squalid and the guy who gave them they key could not have looked less interested in the fact that one of them was wearing ripped rags, had been viciously beaten and had cuff marks on his wrists. Clearly, if they wanted to continue whatever they had been doing to him in the comfort of a bedroom his only concern was that they paid in advance.

Logan bought medical supplies from an all night drug store and stopped off on a liquor store on the way home. The first thing he did was pour Scott, who had no head for it on a good day, a generous mug of single malt and tell him to drink it all down. The fact Scott didn’t argue told them all they needed to know. It was a relief to all three of them when he swiftly passed out.

They cleaned him up as best they could but the scents of Osborn, Dark Beast and Daken all over him were hard to bear. Logan’s claws kept springing out and he had to pace the room and snarl. Henry had more control but his response was the same; horrifyingly, along with the raging anger at what had been done to Scott and the concern for how it was going to effect him, there was also a basic impulse of competition and a need to mask their doppelgängers’ scents with their own. Henry could smell it on Logan and Logan smell it on Henry.

“My God, what _are_ we?” Henry breathed.

“We didn’t do this,” Logan pointed out. “We would never do this.”

“He is never going to look at us the same way.”

“You wanted him to listen to you, didn’t you? Chances are, even with the way Cyke can repress everything, that he’s gonna watch his step a little around you and me from now on.”

Henry’s eyes glowed gold. “There are no words for how much I will hate it if he does.”

Holding his gaze, Logan said, “If you leave now, Cyke’s always gonna think it was because you can’t stomach being around him after seeing him get fucked by evil you.”

“Let’s concentrate on the essentials, Logan. We need to get Scott back to Utopia without anyone seeing us do so. Let’s focus on that for now….”

 

They took him back to Utopia under cover of darkness and sneaked him in through a back door, finding a room for all of them off one of the laboratories. There was a bed and a shower and Warren had already sent for medical supplies for their brand new citizen state. When Henry told Scott he was going to sedate him and then clean him up properly, Scott didn’t argue and they were both certain that even without the visor he wouldn’t have been making eye contact. Logan went upstairs to check that no one was looking for any of them and to explain to Emma that Hank was concerned that Osborn might have cracked some of Scott’s ribs so he was cutting him off from all administrative duties and confining him to the new infirmary for a while. 

He found an email awaiting him on the Utopia server from the_real_wolverine.

_Hey Pops,_

_Thought you’d enjoy watching the attached. I know I did._

_Dewa mata suguni ne_

Logan downloaded the file to a USB stick and viciously deleted the email, saying, “Not if I see you first, you little shit.”

Back in their temporary hospital room for Scott, he played the file on the computer, he and Henry both emitting low angry growls as they watched Osborn, Dark Beast, and then Daken all raping Scott. Scott’s composure throughout was typically stoic but it was fraying by the time they started in on him again in the alley and by the time they’d gotten to him it was obvious that he’d taken about as much as he could.

“My God, what those animals did to him,” Henry breathed.

Logan was pacing angrily again, claws out, wanting to kill. It was a long time since he’d felt protective of Scott, unwillingly impressed by him, yes, but protective…no. But seeing those vicious bastards violating him for kicks had caused a wave of protective rage that he could barely control. When he looked across at Henry, he saw that his eyes were also glowing with anger.

“How dare they do that to one of us?” Henry breathed.

Logan told him about Osborn beating Scott all over Utopia, arrogantly confident that Scott must bend to his superior will.

“He actually used the word ‘uppity’?” Henry demanded.

“Hell, yeah, right on camera.”

“Well, isn’t that revealing? Osborn utilized your son’s deranged daddy issues and my doppelganger’s innate sadism to sic them on Scott, but for him this was clearly all about regaining the upper hand because how dare a mere mutant oppose his superior human will. It’s days like this when I sympathize with Magneto.” 

“You gonna stick around or not?”

McCoy’s eyes glowed gold. “Do you think I’d walk away from Scott after this?”

 

Scott woke up wincing, but he looked better, half-broken but not snapped all the way through. Some of it was probably just re-hydration. He did flinch from them and he turned his head away; it wasn’t submissive, it was just not wanting to engage with people who looked like them right now. He answered when they spoke to him but for the first five minutes he was not anywhere close to making eye contact behind that visor. Then he made himself look at them. Made himself breathe normally. Must be telling himself that they weren’t the people who had hurt him and didn’t deserve to be treated as if they were.

Half an hour after waking up and Scott wasn’t flinching and he was turning his head to look right at them - sheltered behind the visor certainly, but still doing his best to make as close to eye contact as he could. Logan kind of wanted to hug him for that because he knew it couldn’t have been easy and he sure as hell appreciated the gesture.

McCoy kept talking medical notes to him; what he’d done, what Scott would need to do to get better. Logan cut in.

“Cyke doesn’t need to hear about how many stitches he’s had, Hank. He just needs to know he’s going to heal, right?”

Scott tentatively turned his head Logan’s way. “Yes.”

Beast said, “You’re going to heal, Scott. Physically, you will be fine in a week. Psychologically – well, no one can say.”

“’Specially as you were already a trainwreck,” Logan put in.

Scott said, “Thank you.” There was no sarcasm in his tone; he just seemed to appreciate their honesty.

McCoy forged on although his teeth were gritted: “You’re horribly bruised inside – not to mention outside – so it’s going to hurt when you walk. You need to rest. Lying down is your best option.”

“Sitting _ain’t_ an option,” Logan added.

Scott actually looked at him like a completely normal Scott then, that weariness of a patience tested almost to breaking point. “I had worked that out for myself.”

Stolidly, Logan said, “Hank and I are gonna carry you anywhere you need to get to. Just for a few days. Sorry if you don’t like it after…you know. But we’re the only ones strong enough who don’t have an Angel of Death in our heads so we’re what you get.”

He had been expecting Scott to tell him he wasn’t letting either one of them touch him but Scott only said, “Thank you, Logan. I appreciate it.” He looked past him to McCoy. “What happened to you?”

McCoy told him, angrily at first and then with sighing resignation, as if hearing the words out loud made him see them differently. “I still think that if you’d spared me a thought after my arrest that you might have known I was in trouble.”

Scott said, “I was trying to outthink Osborn. I was trying to make him too mad at me to think straight.”

Gritting his teeth, Logan said, “Scott – making people so mad at you they can’t think straight is your secondary frickin’ mutation.”

Moving carefully so that he could lie down on the bed in a way that didn’t hurt, Scott said, “No, a stripper in the Hellfire Club definitely seemed to think it was killing the mood I excelled at.” He looked between them, eyes hidden behind the visor as always, but his face open and vulnerable and soul-crushingly young. “I’m grateful to you both for finding me. I couldn’t… I couldn’t have taken much more of….”

McCoy just gripped his hand briefly but Logan leaned forward and pulled the coverlet over him, saying gruffly, “Thanks for not looking at Hank and me like we’re those other versions of us, Slim. Not that either one of us would have blamed you – but it’s appreciated, you not being jumpy around the two of us.”

“You’re nothing like Daken, Logan, and Henry is nothing like his doppelgänger. Why would I be jumpy around you?” He eased himself very carefully onto his side, reached with his bandaged hand for the water bottle McCoy had put there for him and said, “I can’t lie around for too long. Not only do we have to build a country from scratch, Emma has a sliver of the Void in her head. I don’t think Charles is going to be able to wall it off without some help from me, and Warren is going to need some kind of therapy after having had to let Archangel out again – ”

He looked like hell but he sounded weirdly like himself. Almost too much like himself, Logan thought. Beast also frowned. “Scott, you can’t just repress every terrible thing that happens to you. Sooner or later that rancid toybox is going to be too overfull for even you to slam down the lid.”

“I don’t have time to have a nervous breakdown now, Henry. How about if I promise to pencil it in for later?”

He wasn’t even kidding. Logan scratched his bristly jaw and sighed. “Slim, every time I think we get to the bottom of how fucked up you really are, you just drop a new shaft down from that well.”

Steadily, Scott said, “Osborn did this to me to try to claw back a win from a loss. I don’t want him to win. I’d much rather he didn’t gain anything from this particular strategy.”

Logan said, “Well, personally, if we’re talking about our future hopes and wishes for Norman Osborn, I’d like him to get well and truly fucked with a rusty chainsaw.”

McCoy said, “You get no argument from me and I would in fact be more than willing to start up the rusty chainsaw if required. In the meantime, Scott, if you really want to thwart Osborn let’s try this approach: he has forced you to take some much needed bed rest, which is no bad thing. He has forced Logan and myself to confront that we are rather fonder of you than we necessarily like to admit, which is admittedly irksome, but perhaps also no very bad thing. And he has forced you to learn how to delegate – because you are not going to be fit for normal usage for a week – a skill you need to reacquire. You took a terrible beating even before those…animals did…what they did. Psychologically you have just been through a horrific ordeal and your usual method of pretending it didn’t happen and getting on with the next mission just isn’t an option this time, because this time you are too injured to get out of bed.”

Scott was too smart not to see the sense in what Beast was telling him. He sipped his water pensively then said, “Okay. I’m delegating. Henry, go and start building Utopia. Tell Emma and anyone else who might be asking that I’m temporarily too concussed to talk to and you’re in charge. Logan – ”

“Don’t start giving me orders,” Logan said shortly. “Not unless those orders are that I’m staying right here.”

Scott looked nonplussed. “Why?”

“Because that’s what I’m going to be doing. Unless you think it’s a good idea for me to go and hunt down those bastards and eviscerate them slowly? Because if you turn down Option One, then that will be Option Two.”

Scott carefully screwed the top on his water bottle, wincing as even that movement sent pain daggering through him. “What’s option one again?”

“Me not budging from this bedside until my blood pressure gets somewhere close to normal. Which – even with healing factor – ain’t going to be happening any time soon.” Logan looked him in his visor-covered eyes. “They fucked you up on my watch, Cyke. That ain’t happening again. And I don’t trust you to stay in bed like you’re supposed to, so I’m keeping you safe and I’m keeping you here. And if you don’t like it – tough.”

Weirdly, Scott looked reassured. He was very pale and weary underneath the cuts and bruises, and although he had taken everything that had happened to him head on, the same way he had taken defeating Osborn and gaining Utopia head on, even though it had involved him being beaten half to death, he looked like he wouldn’t, for once, mind not having to make every decision himself. He looked, for the first time in a long time, as if he wouldn’t mind Logan looking after him, even if it was with some mild bullying and cussing him out thrown in. He looked past Logan to McCoy.

“I have a lot of faults, Henry, but I’m pretty good about following doctor’s orders, so, what are they?”

Unexpectedly, McCoy leaned down and kissed his bruised forehead. “Stay in bed. Get better. Let Logan play nursemaid. If he is half as screwed up as I am by seeing someone who looked like himself abusing you then quite apart from your needs, _Logan_ is going to need to fuss at you for several days to even start to heal.” To Logan, he said, “Scott needs rest and more rest and then more rest again. He needs plenty of fluids, and warmth, and no more than moderate bullying, and someone to carry him to the bathroom whenever his bruised kidneys require it. I would also suggest reading him a bedtime story as he hasn’t had one of those since the last one Kitty told him, and that one, as I recall, did do him quite a lot of good.”

Alone with Logan, Scott still didn’t look spooked, he looked – and Logan found it both strange and touching – happy that he was there. 

Quietly, Logan said, “I know what you did to piss off Osborn so much that he’d do that to you, and Dark Beast is just a frickin’ loon, but what did you do to make my son drag you down that alley and keep hurtin’ you over and over…?”

There was a pause before Scott said, “I told him you were ten times the man that he was and you always would be.”

The look he cast Logan’s way was a little shy; neither of them good at exposing their feelings; so Logan didn’t embarrass him with thanks, although it was the first warmth he’d felt since he’d seen that horror scenario playing out with one of his best friends as the victim and someone with his face playing the villain’s role in it. He reached out and took Scott’s bandaged hand in his and gave it a brief, gentle squeeze, which Scott returned, still a little shyly but as if it meant a lot.

Logan indicated the stack of books Henry had left there when they were waiting for Scott to wake up from his sedation and said, half-joking, “Now, about that bedtime story – any preference…?”

And, against all expectations, Scott settled himself down very carefully in the bed, laid his head upon the pillow and said, “Anything you like, Logan, just as long as it has a happy ending.”

And Logan, far more pleased than he could rationalize, that Scott was being accepting of his care, said, “Is there any other kind, Scott?” and began to read the first chapter aloud.

~


End file.
